


All Hands and Doors

by Minutia_R



Category: Chronicles of the Kencyrath - P. C. Hodgell
Genre: Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 16:10:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/776163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Minutia_R/pseuds/Minutia_R
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>There was a scent on the air--dry, dust, and salt--that recalled her to her childhood, to her mother’s warm, calloused hands and solid presence at her back, adjusting her stance.</i>  Place your feet so, and so.  Wider.  Bend your knees.  No one can move you, if you know how to stand.</p>
<p>How Brier brought Tori back from his weirding-walk, with a little help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Hands and Doors

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opalmatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/gifts).



> This is a missing scene from _Seeker's Mask_ ; it takes place at the same time that Jame is having adventures with the four powers of Rathillien.

_May all hands and doors be open to you._  
\-- Formal High Kens greeting

#

Of itself, her hand sprang open, and she was cast loose. Dizzily, Brier remembered the cadet candidate back at Restormir who’d strung up Lady Jameth’s servant on his lord’s orders. _I did his bidding. And it broke the bond between us. No more lord. No more honor._ Then he’d stepped off the balcony, heels over head, falling, falling . . . is this what he had felt like?

Something brushed against her hand, and she grabbed blindly, desperately, her arm nearly wrenched from its socket with the force of her arrested motion. It was a wrist, bird-thin--a mercy she hadn’t broken it. Attached to the wrist--she turned her head, peered through the weirding-mist--an arm, a slight and ragged form, a shock of white hair. “Healer?” said Brier.

There was no answer. Blue eyes stared blankly ahead. Sleepwalking, as he had so often on their journey, but still solid enough to have stopped her fall, though she must outweigh him two-to-one. The laws of motion in weirding were . . . not more forgiving than the ones she was familiar with, Brier suspected. Only less known.

She looked him over, more boldly than she’d dared so far. Pale, pale, and the bird comparison wouldn’t leave her. Delicate lines of jaw and cheekbone-- _beautiful_ , she thought irrelevantly, and shook her head. Highborn, that was all.

Highborn, and Knorth? The healer had come into the Cainerons’ service seemingly out of nowhere, and back into nowhere he had dropped, Brier had heard after the Cataracts, while she was--mostly unsuccessfully--finding her own feet among the Knorth. But Lady Jameth claimed that he was under her protection, and there had been hints, whispers--not that Brier was trusted with house business. Turn-collar and Highborn, what reason had either of them to trust the other? Yet despite herself Brier had trusted Lady Jameth, and it had landed her here.

At least she wasn’t falling anymore. And there was a scent on the air--dry, dust, and salt--that recalled her to her childhood, to her mother’s warm, calloused hands and solid presence at her back, adjusting her stance. _Place your feet so, and so. Wider. Bend your knees. No one can move you, if you know how to stand._

Brier planted her feet, and wet her lips--though the wind seemed to blow all moisture away--and took up the rallying-cry again: “A Knorth! A Knorth!”

She could make out a figure in the distance, slim, elegant, dressed in black, and moving away. The Highlord, or his sister? Damn it, he had called Brier here, and Lady Jameth had tossed her back--they had no business running away from her. Determinedly, she strode after him--her--whichever, still calling and dragging the healer behind her.

#

The singer Ashe sat in a corner of the smithy, her hood pulled up to hide her rotting face. The living thought she wore it so as not to disconcert them--which was true, as far as it went. She had made her choice to stay among the living, and she had chosen this too. But it was also useful, to have a narrow window through which to see the world. When you saw as much as Ashe did, peripheral vision was a nuisance at best.

Even those who accepted her for what she was--Harn, and Kirien, and the whole community of scrollsmen and singers at Mount Alban who took things in their admittedly-somewhat-doddering stride--even they saw her as a dead thing clinging stubbornly to the trappings and the lands of the living. They didn’t realize she carried the Gray Lands with her; that everywhere she walked, she walked in them.

She saw them now, the unburnt and half-burnt dead, carried by the wind or struggling against it, or coming at last to settle into mumbling senility and drifting dust. And she saw Kindrie laid out, his bleeding head in Kirien’s lap and Brier clinging grimly to his wrist, the darkness rising to meet them taking on a familiar shape.

“Ah, Rose.” For a moment Ashe saw her as she had been when they first met: a sun-blackened, cowlicked youngster in mismatched gear, listening to the complaints of the fancy randons from Tentir (the heat, the dust, the flies) in silence, clearly sure she was worth any five of them--and so she had been. “Always meddling. Why did you . . . save the Knorth girl?”

“For her brother’s sake. As I said.” Perhaps Rose was seeing Ashe as _she’d_ been when they first met: an over-educated officer who didn’t know enough to keep the flies from her tent.

“For her brother’s sake . . . you should have let her drown. If you could. Nemesis.”

“And who died and made you the Blind Judge?”

“I . . . died, Rose.”

“Huh! Save it for the living, I’m sure they’re all very impressed.”

Kirien looked up, a frown between her eyebrows. “Ashe?’ she said, but her voice was faint, weirding-distorted, and Rose smiled slightly as she held out her hand.

“Besides, that boy is more than able to work his own destruction, with no help--went for a weirding-walk, didn’t he, and got himself lost. Do you wish him well? Then follow me.”

Ashe missed the weight of a sword in her hands, of flesh on her bones. But she got to her feet, and her lips pulled back from her teeth in an answering smile. “Follow you . . . shield-sister? Always.”

#

Kindrie slept. Outside, he had a hole in his head, he was bleeding, and someone was calling him, but-- _a bastard has no family_. He wrapped himself in the thought, defiantly, like armor, like a blanket, cold and peaceful as fresh-fallen snow.

He slept, and everything was white. The air held the musk of half-a-dozen flowers; he could name them all by scent: comfrey, heartsease, yarrow. _And if a bastard has no family, what are you doing here?_

No. This was his place, his own.

_Mine._

Kindrie startled, and turned, but everything was white. Was he blind? He knew that voice, with the hiss of a pulled thread in a tapestry, knew it as well as his own. “Mother?” No, she had never been that, to him. “M-matriarch?”

No answer, no sign she had ever been there. That was how Lady Rawneth moved through a soul-image, effortlessly, leaving no ripples except those she chose. She had been his teacher, once; Trinity knew why she had bothered. _Bastard, Shanir, weakling--who would want you?_

Not the Highlord, certainly. But if Torisen--as Kindrie proudly maintained--owed him nothing he wasn’t willing to pay, that went both ways. Kindrie owed him nothing, and his mad sister even less, who called him _cousin_ in one breath and _priestling_ the next, who extended him her protection and kept throwing him into walls. Knorth meant them, not him, so the insistent voice calling beyond the Moon Garden’s door could just shut up any time now.

And still, something in that voice compelled him: not the compulsion of a lord’s will, but of strength, conviction, uncompromising honor; all things that Kindrie lacked. He could almost put a name to that voice, almost-- _ignore it. She doesn’t want you. No one ever will, except me._

Lady Rawneth’s words? Or his own? Or maybe her poison had sunk so deep into his soul that there was no difference anymore. There was only one way to find that out.

Groping blindly past tendrils and clinging burrs, Kindrie opened the door.

#

“A Knorth!” came the rallying cry, and Torisen ran. There was a step on the stair, a breath in the dark; whatever he had called down in a moment of thoughtlessness would follow him to the ends of the world. Caught in a nightmare of things half-remembered and impossible, his only thought was to get as far away as he could. It wasn’t until his lungs began to burn and his legs to ache that he asked himself: _away from what?_

The Haunted Lands, where his dead father still waited for him, muttering? No, that was another time, and besides . . . .

“That bolt is shot,” he said aloud, letting his footsteps slow and stop.

“Are you sure that’s wise, my lord?”

“No one asked you,” Tori snapped, and only afterward registered who had spoken. He remembered with a guilty start that he’d barely thought about Kindrie since the Cataracts. Well, hadn’t Lord Ardeth taken him in hand? Tori had been avoiding Adric for several good and valid reasons, but given what he unfortunately owed Kindrie he should have checked up on him at least. Now he was cringing. Trinity, didn’t the man have any backbone?

“No, my lord; I’m sorry.”

“Well, never mind,” said Tori. He raked a hand--not the splinted one--through his hair and looked around. Clinging to Kindrie’s hand was Brier Iron-Thorn: his proudest acquisition after the Cataracts, and his most shameful non-acquisition. He had never expected to see them together, especially not . . . through the shimmering haze, he made out a plain of sand, endless sky, a dark smudge on the horizon. God’s claws, Urakarn. “How did we all get here?”

“You took a weirding-walk, my lord,” said Brier. “Your sister sent me to find you.”

“Brier was calling for a Knorth,” added Kindrie, with a sidelong look at the cadet. “I--well, I’ve told you I have some Knorth blood.”

There was something, or more than one thing, that they weren’t telling him, but--Tori remembered, now, standing at the foot of where Mount Alban should have been, shouting for someone to come down. He had brought Rose Iron-Thorn’s daughter here, within sight of Urakarn, and Kindrie as well. He didn’t know what the Karnids would do to a priest-trained Kencyr, nor did he mean to find out. “The more important question is, how do we get back?”

“We’d better hurry.” Brier had to raise her voice to be heard above a growing rumble. “The tide is coming in.”

#

The tide swept everything before it; every armored, fanged, or tentacled thing that had swum the seas of Rathillien before the Kencyrath had ever set foot there, everything whose powdered bones or shells made part of the great salt desert. Rose cleaved through the surf with powerful strokes, and Ashe floundered in her wake. Neither of them needed to come up for breath, but Ashe stuck her head above the surface for a better view, and said, “There!”

Three figures stood on an island of desert in the midst of an ocean; the tallest one shook off the hand of her companion, adjusted her stance, and turned.

“Mother,” breathed Brier.

“Brier,” said Rose.

Water-flowing met earth-moving, circling, never touching, with the boom of the sea as an accompaniment. “You do remember what I taught you,” said Rose.

Brier shook her head. “I never--I never found your bones.”

“Yes,” said Rose, “you have.” She held out her hands, and Brier, after a moment, closed hers around them.

#

“Ashe!” said Kirien, looking up in surprise, but careful not to jostle Kindrie, whose breathing had resumed the regular rhythm of dwar sleep. And then, almost a squeak, “Highlord!”

Tori gave her a grave nod. “Hello, Kirien. I understand my sister is around here somewhere.”

“Oh. Yes. Just outside, although I’m not sure it would be wise at this point to interrupt . . .” Kirien raised a hand to her cheek. “Er, Ashe, you’ve got . . .”

Ashe plucked a slimy thing with suckers off her face, and crushed it against the floor with her staff. “Don’t . . . ask,” she said. Meanwhile, Brier had loosed Kindrie’s wrist, and was turning her hands over and over, staring at them with the most unreadable expression.

“Well,” said Ashe. “I suppose . . . I had better go see what our nemesis is up to.”


End file.
